Wall St. Journal: China HPC Programs not so Super

Bob Davis from the Wall St. Journal writes that China’s much-vaunted supercomputer program is mired in local politics that has stymied innovation.

One of China’s greatest weaknesses is in software development, a potentially crippling problem because the usefulness of the machines depends on the quality of the software applications. Less than 10% of supercomputing funding goes to developing such applications, said Chinese researchers who complain that political leaders press them to build headline-grabbing new machines rather than focus on whether they are used to their full capabilities. In the U.S., which spends about six times as much on supercomputers as China, the software budget equals about 30% of hardware spending, and computer specialists say even that level isn’t sufficient.

Comments

I agree that in supercomputing China should spend more on software and also work as a team. But simply compare the numbers in dollars will lead to a biased result. Software cost is mostly spend on people. How many times more a software engineer in US costs more than in China?

Resource Links:

Latest Video

Industry Perspectives

Over at the IBM Blog, IBM Fellow Hillary Hunter writes that the company anticipates that the world’s volume of digital data will exceed 44 zettabytes, an astounding number. "IBM has worked to build the industry’s most complete data science platform. Integrated with NVIDIA GPUs and software designed specifically for AI and the most data-intensive workloads, IBM has infused AI into offerings that clients can access regardless of their deployment model. Today, we take the next step in that journey in announcing the next evolution of our collaboration with NVIDIA. We plan to leverage their new data science toolkit, RAPIDS, across our portfolio so that our clients can enhance the performance of machine learning and data analytics." [Read More...]

White Papers

With the exponential growth of data that needs to be analyzed and the data resulting from ever-more complex workflows, the need for faster data movement has never been more challenging and critical to the worlds of High Performance Computing (HPC) and machine learning. Mellanox Technologies is once again moving the bar forward with the introduction of and end-to-end HDR 200G InfiniBand product portfolio. Download the new white paper, courtesy of Mellanox, that explores in-network computing and the benefits of the switch from 100G to 200G Infiniband.